At First, Owen Wilson Didn’t ‘Get’ Midnight in Paris

It won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Woody Allen, who also directed it. Quentin Tarentino called it his favorite movie of 2011, and it became Allen’s all-time top-grossing flick. But Midnight in Paris star Owen Wilson says at first he wasn’t sure the film would work at all.

“When I read the script, I didn’t quite get it,” the Dallas native told interviewer Gary Cogill last night, before a screening of the movie for several hundred people at Klyde Warren Park. “I remember talking with Wes [Anderson] and saying, ‘Geez, I dunno. It has a time-travel element, and I don’t know how that’s gonna work. Who do you get to play Hemingway, Fitzgerald, all those iconic figures?’

“I think that ends up being one of the most successful parts of the movie, all that stuff. You just go along for the ride, literally …” said Wilson, pictured here on the big video screen in the park’s Muse Family Performance Pavilion. “All the actors [Allen] cast for those guys, it just kind of works. … And even when I saw the movie, I was, ‘Well, you know, it seems, I dunno.’ I have a hard time judging stuff I’ve worked on. When it did come out, some people really seemed to love it.”